1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to communication devices and communication methods.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, technology called “handover” has been used. Wit this technology, two communication means that support respective communication modes that are different from each other can be automatically switched to perform communication. The handover technology is applied to, for example, electronic devices that use infrared communication or contactless near-field communication (hereinafter referred to as “NFC”) as a first communication mode and that use a wireless local area network (hereinafter, “WLAN”) or Bluetooth® (hereinafter, “BT”) as a second communication mode. Such electronic devices use, for example, the first communication mode to transmit authentication information for the second communication mode and use the authentication information to automatically perform authentication setting for the second communication mode. This arrangement allows a user to automatically use a communication function associated with the second communication mode without knowing the authentication processing and the setting processing.
Recently, many standards institutes have proposed technologies called “simple authentication” and “handover” using personal area networks (PAN). For WLANs, such systems are proposed in a Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) standard. In addition, for BT, related systems are proposed in Secure Simple Pairing (SSP) in Core Specification version 2.1. More specifically, SSP standardizes a system in which authentication can be easily performed by exchanging authentication information through NFC communication without the user directly inputting authentication information to a device.
When a wide range of user convenience of users is pursued, not only authentication processing for the second communication mode but also application launch and so on using the first communication mode come into consideration. For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2005-295574 discloses a technology for starting a video conference system by using an infrared communication function of a mobile phone as a trigger. As another example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2007-166538 discloses a technology in which a first communication mode is used to exchange information for a second communication mode and an encryption system and data-transferring means is switched into the second communication mode when a compatible system is found. This technology is an example in which the handover technology is applied as a technology for ensuring data confidentiality.